Written on 28th June 2009
4 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Technologic Overkill is reportedly the first music video shot on an iPhone 3GS. The song by XFYA records the activities of a little blue robot and his efforts to become significant in an increasingly technological world.
Created by Steve Ellington of The Automatic Filmmaker, its rather good actually (considering its shot on a phone):
Written on 12th May 2009
9 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
French music group Make The Girl Dance have released the music video to their song “Baby, Baby, Baby” and whoever thought of this is a complete and utter genius.
Aside from Baby, Baby, Baby I haven’t got the foggiest what the lyrics are saying, does it matter? No. Will I share it? Yes. Will you? You know it.
So far, we have been used to watching movies to see how they were made. But that was it! Paying the bucks and watching them (enjoying or not – that’s another story).
What if you, as regular folk, could participate in making a movie? Have a say in what movie would YOU like to see? What is in the script? Or what actors should play certain roles?
Now you can!
Because I’m passionate about filmmaking and its aspects… Sooner or later I had to find out about Massify.com. This is filmmaking meeting Web 2.0 type of service. Rather than starting to make movies from top to bottom this service has the reverse approach: start from bottom to top.
The community built around the site have a say in what movie gets made, what actors should be cast, and script changes. If you have a movie script or music video idea, for example, you can submit it to the site and the community will vote. If it gathers enough votes your script might turn into a movie (or a video clip).
That was the story of Perkins 14, the first ever fan-created horror flick using Massify community in partneship with After Dark Films (the organizer of After Dark Horrorfest).
Many filmmakers are aspiring filmmakers who pitched the idea of an ultimate horror film. The winner voted by the community was Jeremy Donaldson, an young aspiring filmmaker (read his interview and see the pitch). After the idea was approved, the community also approved the casting of actors. The winners were flown to Los Angeles for screen tests. However the filming was done mostly in Romania (because of a good infrastructure for moviemaking and saving on cost). The film is now in theaters but it seems that only some are running it.
Massify is seen as a possible partner by some music labels (like Epic) and some film production companies (like RSA Films – Ridley Scott’s production company). It is located in New York City and has about 10 employees. One of the founders is Brett Icahn and, yes, he is the son of Carl Icahn, the well-known financier (which is also one of Yahoo’s major investors and backs Massify as well).
The new age of online collaboration entered in the filmmaking world too. It was expected because, like building an Internet company, filmmaking has became much less expensive now (better digital cameras, editing and compositing software, more powerful computers, 3D software, Internet, etc…). Anyone remember Blair Witch Project or Open Water (two successful very low budget independent movies)?
How successful Massify will be remains yet to be seen…but it has a good start.
Last Saturday, I had dinner with friends at their house, and I spent some time with their 14-year old kid, who had just gotten his first electrical guitar. He was teaching himself how to play it by checking out song scores and mimicing other people’s performances found on the web. I started challenging him to dig up some classics from artists like Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits to learn how to play them (he didn’t know any of them, which made me feel old, and I’m only 27). There’s a point to the story, don’t give up.
Every time I asked him to look up a song, he followed the same routine: he fired up YouTube and looked for the original track with a simple keyword search, just to listen a bit. Then, he looked up the scores for the song elsewhere, and then he went to back to YouTube to see if he could find someone who recorded himself playing the chords so he could mimic them. It was really interesting to see, and when I asked him if he knew of any sites who actually focus solely on learning how to play the guitar, he declined. If you’re wondering, there’s thousands of sites like that.
Driving back home, I realized that I often use YouTube to look up music too. Many times, I’m not actually looking for the video clip, just the tune, or maybe a live performance of the artist in question. There’s even software available to convert music from YouTube music videos to MP3, AVI, WMV, etc. And then there are websites who aggregate music videos from YouTube on their properties, like YouTubeMusic.ws and Clipmachine.
Evidently, the material is copyrighted more often than not (sites like Muzu TV, PluggedIn and Gotuit are trying to crack that nut), but that hasn’t stopped YouTube from becoming the default repository for music videos as far as I’m concerned. They realize this, which is why they’re working on securing licensing deals with the major record labels too. They’d be foolish not to.
Of course, while it’s easy to find popular music (say, Madonna) on YouTube, it’s a lot harder to find stuff from more obscure artists. Also, the social networking element of YouTube isn’t optimized for discovering new music and sharing it with your friends like Last.fm, iLike or MOG are. Another reason not to use YouTube for searching music videos would be the fact that there’s not a lot of HD content on there.
So calling YouTube the best music search engine is going out on a limb a bit, but I would very much like to see how many search queries on the video sharing site are actually music-related, and how the many music search engines out there are planning to compete with the sheer size of the Google-owned platform. I like checking out new websites like Mix Turtle as much as the next guy, but I’m pretty sure I’ll forget about it by next week.
Written on 28th June 2009
4 COMMENTS 
Written on 20th January 2009
Because I’m passionate about filmmaking and its aspects… Sooner or later I had to find out about 
Written on 21st July 2008
Driving back home, I realized that I often use YouTube to look up music too. Many times, I’m not actually looking for the video clip, just the tune, or maybe a live performance of the artist in question. There’s even 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
